Professor Earns NSF CAREER Award for Data Center Research
School of Computer Science Assistant Professor Ahmed Saeed has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his research on improving data center efficiency.
The award is the NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty and supports researchers with the potential to serve as academic role models and to lead advances in their department or organization.
"Receiving the NSF CAREER Award is a tremendous honor and an opportunity to advance my long-term research agenda,” Saeed said. “It was only made possible by the creativity and dedication of my students and the unwavering support and guidance of my family and mentors.”
Modern data center servers manage resource allocation and load distribution separately, which can result in conflicting decisions. A key idea behind Saeed’s proposal is to develop an integrated view of these operations to improve efficiency without requiring additional hardware.
“When performing operations jointly, you can maximize performance and completely eliminate the chances of conflict,” Saeed said.
Another driver of the project is what Saeed calls the “single queue fallacy.” This occurs when data center load controllers assume that all incoming requests to a server wait in a single queue to be processed.
In reality, servers are much more complex than this and can handle multiple queues at the same time. Modern workloads have heterogeneous load requirements, meaning that different requests end up landing in different queues.
“This single queue fallacy can lead to severe underutilization of these servers,” he said.
Recent research by Saeed shows that a server’s throughput can be doubled by avoiding the single-queue fallacy.
The potential benefits of this project are wide-ranging and impactful. Maximizing server efficiency would reduce costs and energy use. With fewer resources needed, the project could contribute to more sustainable computing infrastructure. Lower operational costs would benefit companies, application developers, and users.
“The goal of my proposal is to develop mechanisms and policies that can allow data center operators to easily maximize the utilization of all hardware,” he said.
As part of the educational component of his proposal, Saeed plans to organize competitions for students to design more efficient load and resource management algorithms using artificial intelligence.
In addition to this award, Saeed was named a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow last fall to support his goal of making data centers more sustainable.
